Art Fag City at the L Magazine: Halsey Rodman’s The Birds

This week at the The L Magazine I discuss Halsey Rodman’s exhibition at Guild & Greyschkul. The teaser below:

I'm pretty sure most if not all of Halsey Rodman's exhibition The Birds at Guild & Greyshkul succeeds, though I have written about four drafts of this column trying to come to a firm conclusion.”¯ Elegantly gracing the gallery walls, seven three-dimensional hexagonal shapes and two gouache paintings of feet represent the more traditional art objects in the show. Two awkward tables shelving clay feet, an array of bottles and aluminum foil knick-knacks fill the interior exhibition space, along with a chair spewing a cloud of bent aluminum piping, a cluster of multicolored pedestals and a black, tubed sculpture encasing a fluorescent light.

Among the more obviously successful pieces are the Touch Eye Portals, a series of wall-mounted sculptures that look like time machines attacked by painters from the 1980s. These works are a Dr. Who-meets-neo-expressionism tour de force. Similarly moving, in the northeast corner of the gallery, three blackened pipes surround a slim, standing fluorescent light. Along the side of the pipe, the words “The Mist” are scratched into the surface both iterating and mocking the spiritual moment the piece evokes.